A Japanese Funeral

Yuko's grandpa's older brother passed away Friday. We found out on our way to Sakurai, so we had to turn around and go back down the first mountain to get my suit and jack like that. I also had to buy a white shirt (who knows where my old one is), a black tie and some buddhist looking beads to hold at the place. Traditionally at Japanese funerals, everybody would sit in the seiza position, which I can handle comfortably for about 20 seconds. After 5 minutes though, my legs will be completely dead, so I was wondering what would happen after about an hour at this thing. Fortunately for me, there were chairs, so instead of losing my legs, I merely had to move around from time to time due to the restlessness of my butt. Across the entire front of the room, there were many vases of flowers, in 3 rows from lowest to highest, and the sponsors' names were displayed on each vase of flowers for everyone to see. In the middle of all this was a small wooden shrine with his picture displayed. There were also HUGE baskets of assorted fruits in the mix.

There were 2 female monks that did some chanting and bell ringing, which was amplified through 2 speakers. Why? Who knows. The speaker doubled the loudness of the bell sound when the monk hit it though, and it was way too fricking loud. At one point, everybody had to go up family by family (there was a prearranged sitting order according to rank) and take turns taking some incense and putting it into the small burning place next to it. You're supposed to go to the middle, bow to each side of seats, go to the front, bow while putting your hands together praying mantis style with the beads dangling, grab some powder like incense and sprinkle it on the other smoldering incense, bow again, then turn around and bow to both sides of people again, then sit down. It was complete chaos! People slamming into each other, head butting people when they bow... awesome. It was done WAY too fast. It was a nice rest for my butt though. Then for what seemed like forever, all the sponsors came out of nowhere, did the same thing, then vanished back into oblivion. At the end, they opened the casket and gave everybody flowers to put into it, anywhere except for on his face, of course. One thing I found myself wondering is if they do anything to the body to make it look more presentable, because I noticed a nose hair sticking out. Yeah, I was looking, but that's beside the point.

After that, they closed it up, and some relatives carried it outside to a place that had what seemed to be 4 elevator doors with 2 fancy looking lights above each one. They pushed the casket into the open elevator door, one of the relatives pushed the button, a worker put his ear to the door and said with approval, "It's lit." Then we all left. The immediate family stayed at the place however, and had a light lunch or something, waiting for a little over an hour until the cremation was over, after which they would go pick out the bones to bury them. And I guess they keep the ashes and put them in a small fancy container on a shrine at their house. Good times.